Why Brits don't get America, Ronald Reagan is the greatest post-war president, and y'all should like country music

Most of the time the government is not the solution to our problems and you can be patriotic and proud of your country as well as working hard to better the conditions of working men and women

The relationship between Britain and the USA is a curious one. On one hand we take much of our culture - film, music, writing and games - with the result that we feel that we are like Americans, that we understand them. The other hand, however, involves us saying that Americans are irredeemably common, uncouth and vulgar. But the reality is that the British have only a surface appreciation of American culture and politics informed by the filtering of these things through elite US media and the UK’s dominant broadcaster and upmarket press. It isn’t so much that we ignore mainstream America but rather that, because the Californian and New England elites dislike mainstream America, we are presented with a caricature of middle America that exaggerates what those elites see as failings (bad diet, big cars, poor dress sense and religion). Nowhere is this better illustrated by the attitude towards the US political right and one of its cultural behemoths, country music.

All my adult life, the presentation by UK media of even mildly right wing American politics has been characterised by them being really stupid. Of the four Republican presidents since 1980, only George Bush Sr isn’t mostly remembered as being really dumb. I think back to ‘Spitting Image’ portraying Ronald Reagan as a man without a brain or the more recent framing of George W Bush as a sort of idiot child. It is probably best not to dwell too long on the perceived failings of Donald Trump but yet again the preferred idea among UK observers is that Trump isn’t very bright. Of the three democrats, only Joe Biden gets anything close to this sneering dismissal and that’s just because he went doolally during his time as president. Up to the point where his dementia was too hard to hide, everyone was telling us he was sharp, witty and insightful.

The same slightly sneering and dismissive tone is heard when these same pundits and commentators talk about country music. The ‘Rest of History’ podcast’s series on 1968 is brilliant but when the subject turned to Nixon using country music in his campaign, there’s a sense that it was rather like something the cat brought in, not an authentic and powerful music born from America’s history. I’m not picking on Tom Holland here because his outlook is entirely mainstream - right wing politicians in America are mostly dumb, unsophisticated hicks and country music is naff. But when you’re a country music fan and Ronald Reagan is your political hero, there’s a temptation to shout at the superficiality of this analysis, especially from a nation that thinks Irish folk music, a huge part of American country, is cool.

Like most Brits in the 1980s, I bought into the slightly sneering dismissal of Reagan as just a folksie but dumb ‘B’ movie actor who spent most of his time napping, at least when he wasn’t wearing a big hat while riding a horse. But, sometime around 1993 a friend (who was a Labour activist and is now a Lib Dem councillor) went into spasms of delight at the genius of Reagan as a speaker, to the point of quoting large chunks from the ‘One More for the Gipper’ speech at the 1988 Republican Party Convention. This one conversation changed almost everything about how I saw American politics, Tim Caswell made me something more than just another Tory, I became a true believer in the Reagan message:

“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.”

There’s a new biography of the man who became my political hero written by Max Boot. I haven’t read it so have no comment to make except that reviews are generally kind. The problem is that reviewers (it seems, in part, taking the lead from Boot himself) are obsessed with telling us that Reagan was stupid - “a head of state lost without a script” - and that America’s most libertarian President was somehow a proto-Trump:

“Boot, a lapsed conservative, is disgusted by the current horde of Maga Republicans. Even so, he admits that Trump’s most blustery slogan originated with Reagan, who led his own crusade to “make America great again”. A pair of Trump’s eventual fixers lurked on the fringes of Reagan’s first presidential campaign: Roy Cohn and Roger Stone arranged for an endorsement that enabled Reagan to win the usually left-leaning state of New York.”

It is notable too that the reviewers want to stress that Reagan had no role in the events that led, beginning at the end of his presidency, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and, it was hoped, the defeat of communism. Here (unsurprisingly given the journal’s enthusiasm for communism) is a sneering chunk from Jackson Lears writing in the London Review of Books:

“This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold Warrior. His rhetorical assaults on the ‘evil empire’, coupled with a relentless military build-up, had pushed the Soviet Union into an unwinnable arms race, destabilised its economy and accelerated its collapse. The pivotal moment in this narrative was Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, issued in Berlin in June 1987: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ One could hardly imagine a tale more flattering to Americans’ nationalist narcissism, or more fitting to the unipolar moment when Madeleine Albright anointed the United States as ‘the indispensable nation’. Among politicians and pundits, the story that Reagan led the US to victory in the Cold War has flourished for nearly forty years.”

You have to wonder just what it was that Reagan did to get under the skin of left-wing - and once but very publicly no longer conservative - historians that they can’t see what’s sat there right before their eyes. For sure the essential stupidity of socialism was the main reason for the Soviet Union collapsing but it was Reagan exploiting America’s economic power by creating a new arms race that pushed the Evil Empire over the brink. The suggestion that Gorbachev simply gave up is so preposterous as to be barely believable. Yet it is important to the current elite narrative that Reagan is dismissed as just an actor who got his philosophy from Readers Digest. The hard truth is that Reagan is, without a doubt, the most consequential US President in the period since WW2.

The first reason is that, in the tradition of Disraeli, Reagan reached out to American workers in a manner not seen from Republicans before. It’s true that Nixon used country music as part of a broad appeal to the ordinary American but Reagan began to craft, at least in his rhetoric, the shape of a future Republicanism that worked for blue collar workers who listened to country music as much as it did, perhaps more, for the traditional conservative constituencies. Reagan was the first right wing leader (since Disraeli) to get across to workers that their interests were better served by the nation succeeding rather than in the essentially destructive collectivism of socialism and social democracy. And Reagan’s slightly jokey style, the thing those elite historians dislike most about him I suspect, communicated to middle America that he, and his ideas, were on their side.

It is probably true that the migration of conservatism away from the country club and into the honky-tonk is one of the reasons for Donald Trump’s success (and, although the words might be different, why christian democracy and the centre right generally is dying in Europe replaced by an abrasive, assertive and often racist new right). But the biggest difference is that Reagan never compromised on his aspirational, liberal-inclined conservatism. Trump would be a better leader if he took a leaf from Reagan’s book (plus maybe some of Ronnie’s better jokes) and talked about those Cuban refugees as much as Haitians eating pets.

For me, as a latecomer to Reagan’s world view, there were two really important messages from the great man: firstly that most of the time the government is not, and doesn’t hold, the solution to our problems, and secondly that you can be patriotic and proud of your country as well as working hard to better the conditions of working men and women. These two simple truths are, for me, the beating heart of the conservative idea and Reagan is the only leader to have put those ideas across with charm, humour and no hint of the patronising, paternalism so many centre-right leaders seem to think is expected of them. Above all Reagan spoke of the one thing at the heart of the American dream, the reason why dismissing ‘liberals’ is mistaken. Reagan spoke of liberty:

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”

Instead of relying on bien pensant historians to tell you of Reagan, go find out for yourself. Read his speeches, better still listen to him give those speeches. They are the words of a true conservative, a great leader and my political hero. I also like country music.